Most digital cameras take photos in very large sizes. This can easily eat up your computer’s hard drive space over time, not to mention make it impossible to email or upload to a photo-sharing website.
You can reduce these photos with a very handy little program called Irfanview. Irfanview is a terrific photo-editing program, able to do a multitude of things such as crop photos, convert photo formats to other formats (such as convert .gif to .jpg), improve image appearance, and reduce or enlarge images. Irfanview probably won’t replace your beefy Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro programs (I use Paint Shop Pro all the time, too), but Irfanview is excellent for quick photo editing.
How to Reduce Photos With Irfanview
1. Open Irfanview. Go to the Menu Bar and click “File” and then “Open.”
2. In the new dialog window that appears, locate the photo you wish to edit. For my example, I use “whitehouse.jpg.” Irfanview will load the image.
3. Go back to the Menu Bar and choose “Image.” Select “Resize/Resample” in the menu. A new dialog window will pop up.
4. In this new window, you can customize the size of your image in various ways, among other things. You either can use Irfanview’s automatic settings: for example, see the right-hand side of the window where it says “Some standard dimensions.” You can opt to halve your image or double your image. Also, you can precisely specify the new image size according to your preference. A typical image size for blog is 500 pixels for width. In my example here, I set the width to be 500 pixels, and Irfanview will autoset the accompanying height so that my photo will not be distorted.
5. Make your choice and click “OK.” You will see the image reduce instantly.
6. Save the file: go to the Menu Bar and click “File” and then “Save As.” There are a few things to keep in mind here– save the file with a different name if you want to keep the original photo intact. If you save the new file with the same name as the old file, this new image will completely overwrite the original one.
7. That’s it! You can also tinker with Irfanview and crop images, remove red eye, and more.
One quick note here: many cameras take photos in RAW format. This is a highly detailed, uncompressed file format. When you edit your RAW photo format in Irfanview and reduce the size, be sure to save the photo in .jpg format. Jpg images are the most common images for computer and Internet use, because the .jpg is a highly compressed format that still retains quality image detail. Irfanview saves photos as .jpgs (also known as .jpegs) by default.
In Summary
1. Open Irfanview. Go to “File” and “Open.”
2. Locate the image file to open in Irfanview.
3. Click “Image” and “Resize/Resample.”
4. Choose the size for your photo. Click “OK.”
5. Go to “File” and “Save As.” name your new file and click “Save.”
Sun, Apr 25, 2010
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